SCULPTURE OF A CONVERSATION

E-mail conversation with David Steinby Romuald Demidenko

While at Rupert, David Stein will respond to the way in online forums, strangers deliver vitriol and ad-hominem attack between frustratingly small bits of honest political, cultural, ideological conversation. With a community of participants, he will hijack online conversations, steer them to an ideal of civility and open engagement, and create a pocket utopia online.

You have been working on the installation project consisiting of reproduced and re-worked comments below the articles online. Can you elaborate on that?​I have been using online comments – those remarks below news articles from newspapers online – as source material. I will collect the comments at the end of a New York Times article, say, organize them according to a typology that I invent that, and color code comments according to my typology. Off topic is one color, on topic is another, adding information is one color, arguing with another constributor is another. I then make all of these comments in cut vinyl material – usually used for wall-text or as signage – and layer these comments onto themselves. This palimpsest becomes a sculpture of a conversation. I have done them on panel and as wall hangings with no support or substrate, where the only material is the conversation.

Like much of the Internet, these comment sections are fascinating and repulsive. They are equally sites of democratic debate and exchange and pits of venom, spite, and hate-speech. I love and hate reading them. To the articles I read online, they add information, insightful critique, and witty retorts. Or they demonstrate the triumph of dogma over content, as comments will ignore the content of article and spew ad-hominem attack on the author or the paper. In short, they are both the apex and nadir of conversation and I am obsessed by conversations, especially ones that occur across cultural and political boundaries, which these do. But they are enormous: comments on a Facebook thread can be in the thousands. So, they are also too large to even make sense of, including to the participants, which is weird.

'All sorts of fascinating things happen online that wouldn't in person. The self we present there can be selected and freed from constriction, can express aspects of our personality we hide'

When did you make your first work from the series?

I guess the first piece I finished was in 2010, which was just a first stab at the concept. But the first real piece I was happy with was 2012.

What makes these comments exist online that would not be possible to happen IRL?

​Psychologically, all sorts of fascinating things happen online that wouldn't in person. In person, if we have a conversation, I can see your face, your body language as we speak and adjust, however slightly in the middle of a sentence or word, even. I can backtrack, apologize, reframe immediately if I offend. I also have to live with anything I say if I know you. And my comment will likely fit the version of myself I present to the world in the context I know you. Online, little of that is true. The self we present online can be selected and freed from constriction, can express aspects of our personality we hide. And when we read comments other people make, we read them in our own voice, and respond with greater familiarity or annoyance.

And how do you divide your time to spend at your studio? Is it mostly about being online?

When I am researching a project or an idea, or when I am wasting time, I am online. But a lot of projects require a lot of boring labor time, where I am pulling all of the negative spaces of hundreds of yards of vinyl lettering. During that time, I listen to the radio, to podcasts, or half-watch streaming shows, movies, or sports.

Other times, I work on project ideas and specifics to a soundtrack.

Often the radio or music is streaming, though, so I am rarely not using the internet in some form.

What is special about the art scene in New York City where you are based and how has it shifted thanks to social media?

​I have not gotten a read on the art scene in Vilnius yet, let alone as it exists on social media.

What is special about the art scene in New York is that it is enormous, and totally crazy. It is very commercial, which can be a bummer. But it also has some absurdly good shows every month in galleries and museums.

​Thanks to social media, I learn about listings of shows now. But I still miss art shows that I wish I had seen. I actually miss the pre-internet art days, when I was less aware of the art world and more open. I would walk around Chelsea with a section of the Village Voice and a series of circled show listings, stumble upon quite a number of great shows, and did not know what I was going to see before I went.

David Stein studied Philosophy at the University of Chicago and Sculpture at the California College of the Arts, has been a resident at the McDowell Colony and the Bemis Center, and lives and works in Queens, New York. He has been part of exhibitions at Regina Rex Gallery, the Berkeley Art Museum, Southern Exposure, the Rooseum, and the Kunsthaus Dresden and had solo shows in San Francisco, Sacramento, and Boston.

The conversation with David Stein is part of the project Vilnius at Work​, newartcenter.info's residency at Rupert, Vilnius.